The Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) said that while the bloc was likely to stay together in the medium term, with Greece remaining in the eurozone, the single currency could not survive if countries did not move closer together. Persistently weak growth in the eurozone had led to voter unrest and the rise of populist parties such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Front National in France, said PIMCO managing directors Andrew Bosomworth and Mike Amey.

"The lesson from history is that the status quo we have now is not a tenable structure," said Mr Bosomworth. "There's no historical precedent that this sort of structure, which is centralised monetary policy, decentralised fiscal policy, can last over multiple decades." PIMCO said the rise of populist parties demonstrated how uneasy some people had become about the euro. "Persistently low growth manifests itself in a lack of support in the common currency, so then it leads to the rise to power of political parties that want to end it," said Mr Bosomworth.

US negotiators are said to have given up ground on demands that Iran be forced to disclose the full range of its nuclear activities at the outset of a nuclear deal, a concession experts say would gut the verification the Obama administration has vowed would stand as the crux of a deal with Iran. Until recently, the Obama administration had maintained that it would guarantee oversight on Tehran’s program well into the future, and that it would take the necessary steps to ensure that oversight would be effective. The issue has now emerged as a key sticking point in the talks.

Concern from sources familiar with US concessions in the talks comes amid reports that Iran could be permitted to continue running nuclear centrifuges at an underground site once suspected of housing illicit activities. This type of concession would allow Iran to continue work related to its nuclear weapons program, even under the eye of international inspectors. If Iran removes inspectors — as it has in the past — it would be left with a nuclear infrastructure immune from a strike by Western forces.

“Once again, in the face of Iran’s intransigence, the US is leading an effort to cave even more toward Iran — this time by whitewashing Tehran’s decades of lying about nuclear weapons work and current lack of cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency],” said one Western source briefed on the talks but who was not permitted to speak on record. With the White House pressing to finalize a deal, US diplomats have moved further away from their demands that Iran be subjected to oversight over its nuclear infrastructure.

“Instead of ensuring that Iran answers all the outstanding questions about the past and current military dimensions of their nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief, the US is now revising down what they need to do,” said the source. “That is a terrible mistake — if we don’t have a baseline to judge their past work, we can’t tell if they are cheating in the future, and if they won’t answer now, before getting rewarded, why would they come clean in the future?” On the diplomatic front, greater concessions are fueling fears among US allies that Iran will emerge from the negations as a stronger regional power.

The negotiations, in progress for nearly 18 months, aim to hammer out an accord whereby Iran halts sensitive nuclear work in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of a war in the Middle East. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have been in Lausanne for days to try to reach a preliminary deal by a self-imposed deadline of March 31, and they held several rounds of talks on Saturday.

But close as they have come to the outline of an agreement, the two sides still have deep disagreements that could wreck a deal. Zarif says the six powers - the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - are now the ones who must compromise. "In negotiations, both sides must show flexibility ," Zarif said on Twitter. "We have, and are ready to make a good deal for all. We await our counterparts' readiness."

Western officials close to the talks said it was up to Iran to compromise on the remaining sticking points, which include Tehran's ambitions concerning nuclear research and development and the immediate removal of UN sanctions. "The serious but difficult work continues," a senior US State Department official said. "We expect the pace to intensify as we assess if an understanding is possible." French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters upon arrival in Lausanne that he hoped for "a robust agreement".

"Iran has the right to civil nuclear power, but with regard to the atomic bomb, it's 'no'," he said.

In exchange for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions, Iran will agree to curtail its nuclear enrichment activities for at least 10 years and to allow UN inspectors access to the country to make sure there’s no cheating. It all sounds so reassuringly simple, particularly to war-weary Western publics that – as Bashar al Assad discovered when he gassed his own people – have no appetite for firefighting what is fast becoming a sectarian inferno in the Middle East. And yet that public apathy is exactly what the Obama administration is counting on when it comes to selling a nuclear deal that is already being presented as a binary choice between embracing peace or re-embarking on the road to war.

Those who would even question the merits of this deal are dismissed by administration aides as “warmongers”, a charge that regrettably sticks more easily thanks to ill-judged Republican attempts to publicly undermine Mr Obama instead of tackling the arguments on their merits. This is too vital a debate to be consumed by knockabout Washington politics. It should be about challenging a concerted attempt by Mr Obama to gloss over the third option when it comes to negotiating a deal with Iran – staying tough, and driving a hard bargain.

Western officials soothingly say there is no need to get hung up on the details, just focus on the one-year “breakout time” that keeps Tehran at least 12 months away from being able to make a bomb and trust to the inspections regime that will alert the world long before that happens. “Distrust and verify” says Mr Obama and yet scratch the surface of these negotiations and it is clear that there are plenty of reasons to question whether Iran will ever actually submit to the effective scrutiny on which the credibility of this deal ultimately rests.

Only this week the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that Iran has replied to just one of the 12 questions UN inspectors want answered about its nuclear past, while an IAEA report last month voiced concerns about “undisclosed nuclear related activities” including the “development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Again, officials close to the talks also say it is “unnecessary and unrealistic” to expect Iran to reveal details of its past illegal nuclear activities, and yet without such details most experts agree it is impossible to police future Iranian cheating, since there will be no baseline from which to work.

Pressed later on the subject he said: “This is not something that I can comment on, nor would I comment on.” The ambassador’s reticence to rule out a military nuclear programme may reignite concerns that the autocratic monarchy has its eye on a nuclear arsenal.

Western intelligence agencies believe that the Saudi monarchy paid for up to 60% of Pakistan’s nuclear programme in return for the ability to buy warheads for itself at short notice, the Guardian newspaper reported in 2010. The two countries maintain close relations and are sometimes said to have a special relationship; they currently have close military ties and conduct joint exercises.

The Saudi Arabian regime also already possesses medium-range ballistic missiles in the form of the Royal Saudi Strategic Missile Force. In addition it has significant nuclear expertise in the form of a civilian nuclear programme of the kind Iran says it wants to develop. In 2012 the Saudi Arabian government threatened to acquire nuclear weapons were neighbouring regional power Iran ever to do so. “Politically, it would be completely unacceptable to have Iran with a nuclear capability and not the kingdom,” a senior Saudi source told The Times newspaper at the time.

With negotiators chasing a Tuesday deadline for the framework of a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Iran would immediately respond militarily to this week’s Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, analysts say. But the confrontation has added a new layer of unpredictability — and confusion — to the many, multidimensional conflicts that have turned large swaths of the Middle East into war zones over the past four years, analysts say.

The United States is aligned alongside Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and against them in Yemen. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have joined in the Saudi offensive in Yemen, are bombing factions in Libya backed by Turkey and Qatar, who also support the Saudi offensive in Yemen. The Syrian conflict has been fueled by competition among all regional powers to outmaneuver one another on battlefields far from home.

Not since the 1960s — and perhaps going back even further — has there been a time when so many Arab states and factions were engaged in so many wars, in quite such confusing configurations, said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s so dangerous,” he said.

The “story” of Yemen appears simple. Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, have captured the capital of Sanaa with the help – so say the Saudis – of the Iranians. The legitimate President – Abed Rabou Mansour Hadi – has fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh from his bolthole in the old southern Yemeni capital of Aden. The Saudis will not permit an Iranian proxy state to be set up on their border – always forgetting that they already have an Iranian-proxy state called Iraq on their northern border, courtesy of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

The real “story” is more important. Perhaps half of the Saudi army is of Yemeni tribal origin. Saudi soldiers are intimately – through their own families – involved in Yemen, and the Yemen revolution is a stab in the guts of the Saudi royal family. No wonder King Salman of Saudi Arabia – if he indeed rules his nation – wishes to bring this crisis to an end. But are his bombing raids on Sanaa going to crush a Shia Muslim rebellion?

Unprecedented in modern Arab history, a Sunni Muslim coalition of 10 nations – including non-Arab Pakistan – has attacked another Arab nation. The Sunnis and the Shia of the Middle East are now at war with each other in Iraq, in Syria and Yemen. Pakistan is a nuclear power. The armies of Bahrain and the Gulf states include Pakistani soldiers. Pakistanis were among the dead in the first great battle against Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War.

The Americans do not know what to do. They cannot give the Saudis direct military assistance – their nuclear talks with Iran are more important – and so their soft verbal support for King Salman is supposed to mollify their Sunni allies and avoid antagonising the Iranians. But the closer a nuclear deal comes between the US and Iran, the more forcefully their partners in the Arab world will push their cards. What provoked the Saudis into their extraordinary adventure in Yemen was not the approach of Houthis towards Aden but the approach of a US-Iranian agreement at Lausanne.

The gunmen captured Gwoza nine months ago and turned the town into the headquarters of their movement and a crucial operating base. Shielded by the Mandara Mountains near the border with Cameroon, Gwoza had been the capital of Boko Haram’s self-proclaimed “Caliphate”. The area’s inhabitants are from the same Kanuri tribe as Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, and most of his fighters.

But a Nigerian army statement said: “Troops this morning captured Gwoza, destroying the headquarters of the terrorists’ self-styled Caliphate.” The army added that “mopping up” operations were continuing in the Gwoza area, which has a population of about 300,000. Until this month, Boko Haram controlled about 20,000 square miles of northern Nigeria, ruling a domain the size of Belgium with about 1.8 million inhabitants. Most of that territory has now been recaptured with the help of the army of neighbouring Chad.

But Nigeria’s army is riddled with corruption and incompetence. Whether its forces can hold their gains remains open to question. President Goodluck Jonathan, who faces re-election tomorrow, had been under intense domestic and international pressure to deal with the Islamist insurgency.

The comments were made by EC attorney Bernhard Schima in a case brought by privacy campaigner Maximilian Schrems, looking at whether the data of EU citizens should be considered safe if sent to the US in a post-Snowden revelation landscape.

“You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” Schima told attorney general Yves Bot in a hearing of the case at the European court of justice in Luxembourg. When asked directly, the commission could not confirm to the court that the Safe Harbour rules provide adequate protection of EU citizens’ data as it currently stands.

Other forms of payment are much easier for governments to track, and so they very much prefer them. But we are rapidly getting to the point where the use of cash is considered to be a “suspicious activity” all by itself. These days, if you pay a hotel bill with cash or if you pay for several hundred dollars worth of goods at a store with cash you are probably going to get looked at funny.

You see, the truth is that we have already been trained to regard the use of large amounts of cash to be unusual. The next step will be to formally ban large cash transactions like France and other countries in Europe are already doing. Starting in September, cash transactions of more than 1,000 euros will be banned in France.

We don’t have these kinds of outright bans in the United States just yet, but what we do have are some very strict reporting requirements. A widow’s bank account was seized by the IRS and she now faces criminal charges for depositing her legal inheritance money in lumps instead of all together.

Janet Malone, 68, had $18,775 seized from her — money that was legally earned and was legally bestowed to her by her late husband, Ronald Malone. The problem, according to the government, was the fact that she deposited it in several lumps instead of all at once. According to the Associated Press, Mrs. Malone deposited the cash in increments between $5,800 and $9,000. The widow’s private financial affairs evidently set off red flags under the watchful gaze of the federal government.

The Environment Agency says the figures look bad because the EU's assessment criteria have been tightened. The EU asks nations to grade rivers into poor, moderate, good and high. Governments should aim for rivers to be "good" - that is relatively unaffected by human activity. "High" refers to upland streams in sparsely-populated areas. The statistics show 0.08% of England's rivers are high quality; 17.06% good; 62.4% moderate; 17.22% poor and 3.24% bad.

Rose O'Neill from WWF said: "The figures released today are shocking and show us that things are worse than we thought. This is unacceptable and threatens wildlife and livelihoods. It's clear that we are failing our rivers and the wildlife they impact. We need to see government action to restore these rivers, for example by reducing abstraction and tackling pollution."

These are strong words coming from Israel’s best friend. The mood has not been this bad since 1991, when the elder George Bush delayed loan guarantees to Israel; or maybe 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel (and Britain and France) to withdraw after the intervention against Egypt.

Mr Obama was right to chastise Mr Netanyahu over Palestine. But he should not ignore him altogether. This is a vital moment in the Middle East. Mr Obama may this week embrace Israel’s greatest foe, Iran, by agreeing on the outline for a nuclear deal. As cynical as Mr Netanyahu may be about Palestine, he deserves to be heard on the risk that a deal will turn Iran from a pariah into a legitimate and overbearing regional power.

But rather than dying down, the spat worsened. Anonymous American officials leaked news that Israel has been treacherously spying on them during the Iran talks and briefing Congress — a charge Israel denies. For a president as self-controlled as Mr Obama, the vehemence towards Mr Netanyahu has a stage-managed quality. So why the drama, Obama?

The suspicion is that Mr Obama wants to blunt Mr Netanyahu’s criticism of an Iran deal, or to besmirch him as a racist, so as to stop wavering Democrats from joining the many who cheered Mr Netanyahu in Congress when he denounced the looming agreement as “a very bad deal”. Mr Netanyahu is wrong to reject any plausible deal with Iran. His confrontational tactics may do great damage to his country. Yet he is right on at least one point that Mr Obama is wilfully ignoring: Iran’s belligerent behaviour in the Middle East is an increasing menace.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel's nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth. The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came as tensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu's March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.

Another highly suspicious aspect of the document is that while the Pentagon saw fit to declassify sections on Israel's sensitive nuclear program, it kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document. The 386-page report entitled "Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations" gives a detailed description of how Israel advanced its military technology and developed its nuclear infrastructure and research in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel is "developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level," reveals the report, stating that in the 1980s Israelis were reaching the ability to create bombs considered a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs. The revelation marks a first in which the US published in a document a description of how Israel attained hydrogen bombs.

The report also notes research laboratories in Israel "are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories," the key labs in developing America's nuclear arsenal. Israel's nuclear infrastructure is "an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories," it adds. "As far as nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the US was in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960," the report reveals, noting a time frame just after America tested its first hydrogen bomb.

Aside from nuclear capabilities, the report revealed Israel at the time had "a totally integrated effort in systems development throughout the nation," with electronic combat all in one "integrated system, not separated systems for the Army, Navy and Air Force." It even acknowledged that in some cases, Israeli military technology "is more advanced than in the US."

The 2013 German coalition government agreement states: "We strive for an even closer network of European forces, which can evolve into a parliamentary-controlled European army." "The Chancellor agrees that it is generally good that there is and should be a deeper military cooperation in Europe," said deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz, also referring to the "concentrated challenges" in European security policy, which require a common response.

Elmar Brok, an influential MEP from Merkel’s CDU party, said an EU treaty change was necessary for giving flesh to the idea of a European army. Normally troops are sent abroad by a decision of parliament. Since it is not possible to wait for 28 parliaments to decide, countries should delegate this right to the European Parliament. In the Berlin's Tagesspiegel, Steinmeier spoke of "new risks and threats" to European peace that necessitate a "swift adaptation" of the security strategy. "For the SPD, the long-term goal of a European army is a major policy matter and has been part of the party program for many years," he said.

"The Arab … ministers agreed on adopting an important principle, which is forming the unified Arab military force," Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby told reporters after the meeting in the resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. "The task of the force will be rapid military intervention to deal with security threats to Arab nations," Elaraby added. The draft resolution will be referred to the Arab leaders during their March 28-29 summit in Egypt.

Egyptian TV reported earlier that the ministers asked Elaraby to coordinate with Arab armies' chiefs of staff within one month to begin forming the unified force. The Arab league chief described the resolution as "historic". The dangers facing the region have perhaps never seemed starker. Conflicts are intensifying in Yemen and Libya and the civil war in Syria is entering its fifth year.

Islamic State militants have taken over swathes of Iraq and Syria and spawned splinter groups across the Arab world. The United States and other major powers are seeking a final nuclear deal with Iran, in a process that worries many Sunni Arab leaders wary of Shi'ite Iran's growing influence in the region.